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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25882462">A Lone Tenno's Journal</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vronton/pseuds/Vronton'>Vronton</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Warframe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:01:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,266</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25882462</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vronton/pseuds/Vronton</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>We all know how this story begins:</p><p>A colony ship bound for the Tau Ceti system, a mere eleven light-years from our own Sol, makes the jump into the Void with tens of thousands of souls on-board. Something goes wrong. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but it does.</p><p>Every adult aboard succumbs to madness. Some go immediately, others fight it, and eventually lose. Only the children are left to drift in their broken ship through inverted space. We don’t know for how long; time ceased to have all meaning when we stopped growing.</p><p>We didn’t notice when our broken ship transitioned back into normal space, just past the rings of Saturn. We didn't notice the white emptiness of the Void turn back into the darkest pitch. We didn't notice the stars turn back into lights again, numerous candles lit in the dark.</p><p>But we did notice when unfamiliar, grown up faces, showed up in the corridors of our ship. We fought them, thinking that somehow we had missed this threat. Many of them died. Many more got hurt.</p><p>But they weren’t Void poisoned.</p><p>What we didn’t realize until much later, is that we <i>were</i>.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. A Lone Tenno's Journal continued</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>We are an inconvenience at best, a menace at worst, so we are taken to Lua where we can be forgotten. We are too dangerous, too unpredictable, they said. Confinement is the only recourse. It’s the only way to keep us and everyone else safe.</p>
<p>It is an excuse we permitted, not knowing any better. It is an excuse that one Archimedian refuses to accept. She, of all people, should have.</p>
<p>After all, we were the ones that hurt her. We took her sight. It is a shame we all bear.</p>
<p>But Margulis is possessed of a strength that few have. She saw us and didn’t see monsters. She saw survivors who are too young, too scared to be put in the position we found ourselves in. She saw children in need of compassion and understanding, even after we took her sight.</p>
<p>She bends her efforts into giving us the ability to live with every fiber of her being. She fights for it, for us, until she can fight no more.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. A Lone Tenno's Journal continued</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Orokin decided they didn't like her work. She is told she must stop, that we must be forgotten. She ignores every order, every directive. She assures us that we're worth her time and effort.</p>
<p>The Orders keep coming, and she keeps fighting for us, until her refusal can no longer be tolerated; until she can no longer be protected. We hear her defy the Seven, we hear her mournful last words. <i>'My daughters, my sons, I want you to know that my last thoughts are of you.'</i></p>
<p>We bury our righteous rage, our fury, compressing it into an ever-burning coal that resides within our hearts, and we wait. We can do nothing in the moment, we can do nothing for years after her death. We can do nothing when Archimedian Silvana leaves, and we are left with no one.</p>
<p>But as all things do, the war that we are ignorant to reaches our shores on Lua. Where we were shunned before, now we are begged to help. The sentients will destroy everyone, we are told. Nothing they can do has stopped them. They have exhausted every measure and have failed.</p>
<p>We are their last ditch effort to win.</p>
<p>We see an opportunity, if we are patient. Margulis will get justice, we will have our vengeance. We take up the warframes, we take up blade, and gun, and bow, the weapons of the ancient worlds. We learn the ways of war. With this knowledge, we are given a name: <i>Tenno.</i></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. A Lone Tenno's Journal continued</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The war is fought on every planet, on every moon, asteroid, station and outpost in our system. It is unceasing, but we are given moments of respite, or something else to fight. After all, we have also been tasked with cleaning up the mess left behind when the Orokin tried biological weapons against the Sentient threat.</p>
<p>Like many of their grand schemes, the Infested experiment is largely a failure. Infested consume anything in their path, mutating and twisting their victims until they are one with the hoard. We Tenno are immune, we cannot be turned. They try, and sometimes succeed, at tearing our warframes apart.</p>
<p>Warframes can be rebuilt. We, however, cannot be.</p>
<p>Though we do not age, we can still die. We learn this when Inaros Prime's operator is taken from us. Punishment for his insurrection on Mars after exposing the horrors of Continuity to us.</p>
<p>Still, we wait. The war is not over, but the hate in our hearts burns a little hotter. We take our anger out on the Sentients, the Infested, the fledgling cult that made currency their god in place of the Orokin.</p>
<p>While we hone our skills and bide our time, we are given an unexpected gift: someone else to call Mother. She calls herself the Lotus.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. A Lone Tenno's journal, final entry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>We know nothing about her, but she is kind and patient and full of the same love for us that Margulis had. She becomes the intermediary between us and the Orokin, she learns our ways, praises our differing schools of thought. For a time, we think, perhaps when the war is done, we will put our swords down.</p>
<p>It does not last.</p>
<p>The Lotus reaches the same conclusion that we did lifetimes ago: the Orokin must fall. The Sentients, however, must fall first.</p>
<p>The enemy managed to crawl its way into the depths of Lua, hoping to stop the warframes at the source: us. The Sentients don't know what we are, what we can do.</p>
<p>Erra comes within inches of victory, only to be ripped apart by void energy at the Lotus's command. After Erra falls, so too does Hunhow, broken into pieces and scattered across the system, never to be rejoined.</p>
<p>With Hunhow's demise, the war is won. The remaining Sentients retreat, and the Empire, still wounded, celebrates. The Orokin will honor us. We ready our blades for one last battle.</p>
<p>They make it easy for us, gathering in one place, at the edges of the system. Only a few are absent, but it is no matter. We wait for the ceremonial drumbeats patiently until the striking of the last drum.</p>
<p>Chaos erupts after the Seven are slain in simultaneous, clean strokes. An enclosed space means our powers can reach to every bulkhead, pillar, floor, and balcony. The Dax defend the best they can, they have no choice otherwise. The Dax fall, even though we have no desire to slay them.</p>
<p>We leave carnage in our wake as we hunt down the Orokin, leaving the Grineer without masters, leaving the many corpus without a higher caste. When our work is done and our blades have been blooded, we take to our ships, scattering throughout the system, with few exceptions</p>
<p>Gara and Revanent stay on Earth, protecting the small human outposts that managed to survive the pollution, the Sentient war, and the outbreaks of Infested.</p>
<p>Limbo dances himself into the Rift and does not return.</p>
<p>Protea, severed from us during the war, remains in her prison with Parvos Granum.</p>
<p>The rest of us slumber while the Lotus takes control of Lua and pulls it into the void. She bids us goodnight, and to dream of a better system. And when the eons have carried on, year by year, decade by decade, century by century, until we've become nothing but legend and myth, we hear her familiar voice when it enters our Dream: <i>"Wake up, Tenno."</i></p>
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